Project group Hardware-based simulation of energy-autonomous buildings

Period: summer semester 2014 and winter semester 2014/15

Vision

The "Hardware-based simulation of energy-autonomous buildings" project group is pursuing
the vision of developing an energy management system for a simulation system consisting of several components
that optimises self-consumption
. The components consist of energy generators, storage units and
consumers as part of the simulated building. The energy generators for supplying
the building with electrical energy are photovoltaic systems and/or combined heat and power plants,
which also generate thermal energy. The storage systems available are
energy storage systems and thermal storage systems, so-called pu er storage systems.
The consumers are divided into non-controllable consumers, which form the base load
, and controllable consumers. The building should neither be an
industrial company nor a private household, but generally a
large building with a given heat demand, high electricity consumption and controllable
consumers within the building. Among other things, the
simulation of a hospital, a school or a hotel could be considered.

For the hardware-based simulation, the project group is to create a simulation system
that performs self-consumption optimisation for any scenarios with different
framework conditions. It should be possible to analyse different
buildings in terms of purpose and size under freely selectable
weather and climate conditions. It should also be possible to manually add or remove additional
energy consumers within the building
. Such a scenario therefore contains the characteristics of the defined
building, i.e. base load in terms of electricity and heat demand, properties via
the controllable consumers and the decentralised energy generators and storage units in
the simulation. This includes, among other things, the dimensioning of the energy systems,
i.e. information on how much electrical and thermal energy can be provided by
the systems. Furthermore, two weather data sources
are used for the scenario. The first consists of forecast data, which
is used to calculate feed-in data and load forecasts. The second
source provides real weather data, which may deviate from the forecasts.

When the simulation is started, the developed energy management system
calculates a schedule, the so-called "timetable", for the energy supply
, which is updated/adjusted every 15 minutes depending on changes in load or
weather data. The aim of creating the schedule is to optimise self-consumption in order to minimise energy procurement costs within the defined simulation period. It should be possible to evaluate the result with regard to the questions of what the energy management has achieved in relation to a scenario, whether more energy had to be taken from the public power grid compared to the uncontrolled schedule or which parameters or configuration had a positive influence on the result achieved in comparison with different scenarios.

Contact

Tobias Kölker

Email: tobias.koelker(at)informatik.uni-oldenburg.de